This week our Global Innokas Network experienced global education in many angels. First, we participated in a state grant applicants’ seminar day organised by Finnish Board of Education. We heard speeches of global competences, how to grow up to be global citizen and new sights of language education. We also had an opportunity to connect with actors from Finnish educational field that implement global education in their municipalities. 

Second, we had a meeting with Finnish Global Innokas teachers in the University of Helsinki. The teachers shared best practices from the last school year and planned this year’s activities and events. Fruitful face-to-face conversations and working together for the same goal is fairly important to teachers as well as us organizers. In such skilful and ingenious group, new kind of educational innovations can truly nourish!

At the Global Innokas network meeting I met teachers from Helsinki and Oulu. We decided to get familiar with each other’s classes and schools as well as different sides of our country. There would be a school from the capital city (3rd grade), a small school from the countryside (1st grade) and a big school from a town in Northern Finland (5th grade) involved in this partnership. We decided to set FaceTime and Skype connections between the schools. The classes made questions for each other to try and guess the location of the other school and they were only allowed to answer with “yes” or “no”. My class was the first grade and luckily they had the easiest job to figure out the location of the other schools since they were located in big cities. The other two classes had a tougher time trying to guess our location. We also prepared ourselves for the video call by filming the surroundings of our school with iPads and compiled them into an introduction trailer.

The other classes also sent introductions of their hometowns for us to see. We’re planning to continue our collaboration in autumn by sending our ‘friendship classes’ presentations we’ve been making in our environmental studies and Finnish classes.

Heli, Hankasalmi Asema School